oddly more confused, and by which moreover confusion was imparted to the
aspect of a gentleman who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came
out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first
took her for one of the Flowers; but during the few seconds that this
required--a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up Sir
Claude--she heard Mrs. Beale's voice, behind her, gather both wonder and
pain into a single sharp little cry.

"Of all the wickedness--BEALE!"

He had already, without distinguishing them in the mass of strollers,
turned another way--it seemed at the brown lady's suggestion. Her course
was marked, over heads and shoulders, by an upright scarlet plume, as to
the ownership of which Maisie was instantly eager. "Who is she--who is
she?"

But Mrs. Beale for a moment only looked after them. "The liar--the
liar!"

Maisie considered. "Because he's not--where one thought?" That was also,
a month ago in Kensington Gardens, where her mother had not been.
"Perhaps he has come back," she was quick to contribute.

"He never went--the hound!"

That, according to Sir Claude, had been also what her mother had not
done, and Maisie could only have a sense of something that in a maturer
mind would be called the way history repeats itself.

"Who IS she?" she asked again.